Pillar Hardware

Pillar Axiom 600MC

Mission-critical, storage with Pillar Axiom 600MC

For the mission critical applications that run any business, data loss and downtime is not an option. The Application-Aware™ Pillar Axiom 600MC storage systems ensure that your data is safe and resilient. A mirrored pair of Pillar Axiom storage systems gives the optimum level of data protection for both remote or local protection of application data.

The Pillar Axiom 600MC is ideal for enterprises with large-scale data centers that require high-performance characteristics to run their financial applications, online transactions, or other applications where speed is a must. The base configuration of Pillar Axiom 600MC is great for companies running applications that don’t have to be the fastest, but that require solid reliability, such as Oracle or SQL databases, Microsoft Exchange, consolidated archives, or disk-to-disk backup.

Combined with Pillar’s high-availability design and implementation services, the Tier 1 Pillar Axiom 600MC provides the highest level of application availability, exceptional performance, and a low cost of ownership.

When you consolidate your applications on a thinly provisioned Pillar Axiom 600MC, you will get immediate access to more disk capacity without impacting performance—in fact, Pillar is known for its ability to independently scale performance and capacity. And when you need to add capacity, you can do so without adding another box to your IT floor: just add more drives to your system—up to 1.6 petabytes of raw capacity.

Technical and Business Benefits

  • 80% utilization – twice the industry average
  • Thin provisioning to further boost utilization and reduce power
  • Store multiple tiers of applications in a single array
  • 99.999% uptime for your Mission-Critical Applications
  • Provide system-wide non-disruptive data protection
  • Modular architecture for easy scalability and flexibility
  • True continuous replication of critical data to a single or dual DR site(s)
  • Support different drive types in a single storage pool
  • Independent scale of performance and capacity
  • Non-disruptive code upgrades
  • Up to 1.6PB of raw capacity and a 192GB cache
  • High availability and scalability Easy management and guided maintenance
  • Ideal for any data center, including Oracle deployments

 

Features
The Application-Aware Pillar Axiom 600MC is designed for customers requiring the attributes of Web 2.0 class computing in flexibility, scalability and ease of management as well as absolute reliability and continuous uptime for their mission-critical applications, but for whom legacy high-end arrays are too complex and costly.

The Axiom 600MC is comprised of a mirrored and replicated system pair with modular and highly redundant hardware components. Combined with complimentary AxiomONE local protection software and inherent replication technology, the Axiom 600MC neutralizes threats to data availability. The mirrored Axiom environment provides continuous uptime and protects against planned and non-planned downtime events that may occur.

Finally, this mission-critical solution is maintained, optimized, and serviced by Pillar Professional Services to meet the high availability needs of any mission-critical production environment. In fact, that’s guaranteed: The Pillar Axiom 600MC is guaranteed to provide a minimum uptime of 99.999% and an agreed-upon minimum utilization and performance service level for a full year. If any reconfiguration or other service work is needed to bring your system to this level, then this service will be provided free of charge.

MC Means Mission Critical

The Application-Aware Pillar Axiom 600MC is designed for customers requiring the attributes of Web 2.0 class computing in flexibility, scalability and ease of management as well as absolute reliability and continuous uptime for their mission-critical applications, but for whom legacy high-end arrays are too complex and costly. Read about why it’s good to be application aware.

The Axiom 600MC is comprised of a mirrored and replicated system pair with modular and highly redundant hardware components. Combined with complimentary AxiomONE local protection software and inherent replication technology, the Axiom 600MC neutralizes threats to data availability. The mirrored Axiom environment provides continuous uptime and protects against planned and non-planned downtime events that may occur.

Finally, this mission-critical solution is maintained, optimized, and serviced by Pillar Professional Services to meet the high availability needs of any mission-critical production environment.

Thin Provisioning for High Utilization and Consistent Performance

Preparation for future need shouldn’t mean reducing your capacity today. Allocate storage based on future need without “claiming” that space and making it unavailable and unused. This reduces the amount of physical disk necessary to support a given application.

Thin provisioning is recognized in the industry as a critical approach to simplifying storage management while drastically improving storage capacity utilization. In fact, Pillar’s Thin Provisioning along with QoS and distributed RAID delivers industry-leading utilization rates (above 80% today) and will drive utilization even higher for thinly provisioned LUNS while maintaining consistent performance.
No other thin provisioning vendor can consolidate multiple applications in a single array with a dynamic quality of service assigned to each virtual volume.

Profiles for Self-Tuning Storage

Pillar has characterized the I/O of today’s popular applications such as Oracle Database, Microsoft Exchange, VTL, VMware, Streaming Media, and more. These configuration parameters have been saved as open source Axiom Profiles, and are available to you in a simple drop-down menu in your Axiom’s Storage Management Tool user interface. Choose a profile from the menu and the Axiom will literally tune itself.

And the profiles are portable! Start with one of our standard profiles and customize it to meet your particular needs, then export it to share with other lines of business within your company. Simply click the Import Profile button to load the portable profile into your system.

Using Pillar’s portable, open source profiles to tune and provision your storage system means faster deployment and tuning replication, and can save you tens of thousands of dollars on professional consulting costs.

Simpler Storage Consolidation

In the past, storage buyers had to choose between the performance of SAN storage systems and the cost-effectiveness of NAS. Pillar eliminates this tradeoff by seamlessly accommodating both SAN and NAS, giving both complete access to a shared storage pool. With Pillar's modular system, you can:

  • Deploy a NAS-only system
  • Deploy a SAN-only system
  • Combine native SAN and NAS on one platform

Pooled RAID 10

Given its ability to spread a LUN across multiple RAID controllers, the Pillar Axiom’s implementation of distributed RAID 10 delivers industry-leading performance for applications that need higher write throughput performance. Customers with OLTP applications can expect as much as 50% improvement in write throughput traffic compared to RAID 5 configurations.

The ability to share disks for both RAID 5 and RAID 10 LUNs allows RAID 10 performance and reliability, without the capacity overhead of typical RAID 10 approaches.

True Flexibility and Modular Scalability

Only the Pillar Axiom delivers the flexibility to change the characteristics of your storage environment at will – without disruption or difficult migrations. Fibre channel, SATA, RAID – SAN(fibre channel and iSCSI), NAS. Change connectivity, increase capacity, and improve performance as desired by purchasing only the components you need. Consolidation is easy in the truly heterogeneous Pillar Axiom.

And with the massive scalability of performance and capacity offered by the Pillar Axiom, your system will give you up to 1.6 petabytes of raw capacity while maintaining multi-tenancy capability, and the new capacity will be automatically integrated into the storage pool.

Capacity scaling independent from performance scaling is another reason that Pillar leads the way in the storage industry. And this also means where you might have needed four storage systems, the Axiom can do it all with one.

The Ultimate in Oracle Support
Oracle Database together with Axiom storage deliver high performance while providing an easy management environment. The Pillar Axiom 600MC gives even greater Oracle support as it writes in 1MB stripes, the largest in the industry.

The 1MB stripe profile allows the Axiom to perform optimally with Oracle’s Automatic Storage Manager, which also writes in 1MB stripes.

Best of Breed Replication

The Axiom 600MC is built with highly redundant hardware components. Combined with AxiomONE local protection software (volume copies, clones) and inherent replication technology, the they neutralize logical, physical, and site-level threats to data availability.

A second Axiom system may be provisioned at a disaster recovery site as a replication target for the main site. In the event of a disaster at the primary site, the recovery site allows data service to continue.
The mirrored Axiom environment provides continuous uptime and protects against planned and non-planned downtime events that may occur.

Support and Services: Ongoing, Onsite and Always On-Call

Pillar reduces the anxiety and eliminates the guesswork by combining proven Professional Services and Customer Support offerings into a cohesive and affordable service offering that’s bundled in the Axiom 600MC.

The importance of your mission-critical data to your business demands the proactive and undivided attention of your storage vendor – and Pillar is answering the call.

Pillar provides extended customer support for the first three years that your system is in production, as an integral component of the Axiom 600MC Storage Solution. It is maintained, provisioned and optimized by Pillar’s Professional Services organization.

The Power of Pillar AxiomONE™ Software

AxiomONE is a suite of software that provides you with an easy way to manage and configure all aspects of your Axiom system.

Simplify. Utilize. Scale.

Pillar Axiom systems are designed from the ground up to simplify your storage, to increase utilization, and to be easy to seamlessly scale without impacting performance.

  • Cut administrative time in half with simplified storage management including six-click setup, automated tuning, application-awareness, near-instant configuration with reusable “profiles,” and guided maintenance.
  • Increase utilization by up to 80% or more with consolidation of multiple drive technologies, elimination of storage silos, single-array tiering and QoS, and thin provisioning.
  • Lower TCO by 50% with unprecedented flexibility, scalability, reduced management overhead, increased power efficiency, and drastically increased utilization rates.